Reader rccola20 wrote in to ask, “Are bloodhounds really that much better at tracking than other dog breeds?”

Bloodhound image via Shutterstock

You always see them hunting down fugitives in the movies, but is that just Hollywood, or are bloodhounds really the best smellers around?

Bloodhounds are pretty much the best in the business. Sometimes called noses with paws, their skills as trackers come from the high number of olfactory receptors — or “scent cells” — tucked up in their wet noses, which detect odor molecules. A human’s olfactory membrane is about the size of a postage stamp and contains 5 million receptors. A large dog like a German Shepherd, meanwhile, has a larger membrane and about 225 million receptors.

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Burmese Python image via Shutterstock

Earlier this week a team of scientists from several universities and the US Geological Survey released a study documenting the dramatically declining numbers of small and medium-size mammals in Florida – including raccoons, opossums, white-tailed deer, bobcats, rabbits and foxes. These population drops all occur in the same areas where pythons and other large, non-native snakes have taken up residence after escaping from one stop or another in the wildlife trade supply chain.

Anyone who’s even heard only the most basic facts about constrictor snakes knows that they’re formidable predators and take down prey by grasping it in their powerful jaws, coiling their bodies around it, and squeezing until it suffocates. Devouring bunnies and possums isn’t even the half of it, though. These big snakes aren’t shy about going after much larger, more dangerous game, too. Like men. And bears.

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Rabbits image via Shutterstock

Is there any truth to the phrase “breed like rabbits”? Sort of. Bunny sex itself is nothing to write home to mom about. When a doe lets a buck know that she’s ready to mate, he circles her, shows off his tail, and sometimes urinates on her. This is what passes for foreplay. Then, the act itself last about 20-40 seconds. Isn’t nature glorious?

The real wow factor of rabbit reproduction is how fast they get around to breeding, and how often they can do it. (more…)

Mary Roach is thoroughly awesome: she’s funny, whip-smart, and well-read. In other words, she’s one of us. Roach is the author of Stiff, Spook, Bonk, and most recently Packing for Mars; in this lecture, Roach tells stories about space (mainly from NASA), including exactly the kinds of questions we all have about space: what’s it like to be there? Does it smell weird? How does food work? What if you get mad at your fellow astronauts? And of course, what’s up with the toilets??

Topics: funny (and sometimes slightly gross/weird) stuff that happens in space. Roach has interviewed tons of people, plus read zillions of transcripts of NASA transmissions, to find the best bits for you.

For: anyone who is not currently eating lunch.

Representative quote:

“The Space Toilet. You may not really appreciate gravity in your lives the way that you should. … [In space] you’re sitting on a shop vac, essentially.” Later: “Okay. I give people the impression that this entire book is about crapping in space, and it’s not, really, honest to God, it’s not. But there’s just one more thing [about crapping in space] I have to tell you.”

Viewing tip: jump to about three minutes in for the actual lecture. Also, you can download the lecture directly from YouTube (link is below the video player) if you want to take it offline.

Further Reading

You’re in for a treat, as Roach’s books are universally awesome: funny, smart, educational, and easy to pick up — basically great vacation reads, but with science content. The book she discusses in the lecture above is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. See also: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

Transcript

I couldn’t find a transcript for this lecture. Anybody got one?

Suggest a Lecture

Got a favorite lecture? Is it online in some video format? Leave a comment and we’ll check it out!

In this brilliant talk, Professor Philip Zimbardo discusses different ways human minds focus on time. Do you focus on the past? If so, are you “Past Positive” (focusing on the good times) or “Past Negative” (focusing on failures)? Do you focus on the present? If so, are you hedonistic or do you just feel it doesn’t pay to plan?

As Zimbardo says, “Most of us are here because we’re future-oriented. We have learned to work, rather than play — to resist temptation. But there’s another way to be future-oriented. Depending on your religion, life begins after the death of the mortal body. To be future-oriented, you have to trust that when you make a decision about the future, it’s gonna carry out.” He proceeds to discuss how in different cultures, people have different paces of life, different time orientations, and how that affects their societies’ function. He also goes into a detailed discussion of how computers and technology change our perception of time, and what that means for things like technology. Basically, Zimbardo makes a powerful argument that our individual (and collective) perception of time affects our health, wellbeing, and work habits. This is great stuff.

Topics: the six flavors of time orientation, how we all start out as hedonists, game-playing kids versus school, why some kids don’t take safe sex messages onboard, an eight-day week, and family meals.

For: everyone, particularly those interested in living an examined life. (I’m looking at you, “everyone reading this.”)

Best anecdote: Zimbardo is Sicilian, and gets into a discussion of how there’s an ongoing debate in Italy about splitting the country into two. It appears, at least in part, to boil down to a surprising linguistic anomaly of the Sicilian language — watch for this around the 3:15 mark.

Further Reading

Zimbardo is pretty awesome, and he’s been around for a while — he’s the guy behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, for example. He has written a bunch of books, but the one on this topic is The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life.

You might also enjoy A Geography Of Time by Robert Levine, mentioned in this lecture.

Transcript

There’s a transcript here.

Bonus Points

The video above ends a bit abruptly, largely because they’re boiling down a much longer talk. Here’s the (thoroughly awesome) full 40-minute lecture:

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In this eleven-minute animation, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains how our notion of the hemispheres of the brain being ultra-separate is a drastic oversimplification, and has had consequences for how we think about our behavior, our culture, and our society. This talk complements Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk (posted in this series two weeks back), in which she discusses the profoundly different minds present in her own hemispheres — and how she experienced the world differently during and after her stroke. McGilchrist comes across in this condensed animation as exceedingly academic — I frankly felt a bit lost at times — which is why, under ‘Bonus Points’ below, I’ve included the somewhat longer original talk, which isn’t condensed, and thus does a better job of making these points without hurrying. My advice: if you watch this animation and find it intriguing but confusing, just switch to the next video. You’ll get a lot out of it.

Topics: why the brain isn’t actually symmetrical, how and why the frontal lobe inhibits us, empathy, why “simpler is better,” lefties and tool use, the Berlusconi of the brain, how our society puts incorrect values on different types of thinking, and how you must use both sides of the brain each task…even if one side is “dominant” in that arena.

For: people willing to devote their full attention to this talk’s super-smart/super-dense content; you might want to go ahead and watch the half-hour version (which isn’t quite as densely packed).

Viewing Note: the video is very detailed; you might want to go fullscreen and turn on HD.

Representative quote:

[Initially quoting Einstein:] “‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.’ We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.”

Further Reading

McGilchrist wrote a book on this subject called The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. There’s an incredible Wikipedia page summarizing the book.

Transcript

Oddly, I couldn’t find a transcript of this video, though other RSA talks have nice PDF transcripts and even dotSUB transcripts. Anybody out there have better luck?

Bonus Points

Here’s the original half-hour RSA talk from which this animation was produced. I was taken by this YouTube comment:

Perhaps it’s germane to the topic that I cannot grasp this lecture when it is presented in the RSA Animate way…too dense, too distracting, too tightly edited and rapid. When Machiavelli is mentioned, I know the connotation intended, to have a tiny picture of Machiavelli drawn for me at the same time is irrelevant. This pertains to the lecture point about the utility of a map when one doesn’t need/want to know all information about the area. To come watch the original lecture was a relief. -clif9710

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This week I’ll bring you the best RSA talks — a series of lectures a bit like TED from the UK. First up, an “RSA Animate” talk — a whiteboard drawing done by hand (although edited a bit to speed it up), along with the audio from a lecture by Sir Ken Robinson. The lecture, like all of Robinson’s work, discusses what’s wrong with our educational system, at a deep level — in a very brief talk, he lays out a cogent argument that our educational system is predicated on systems of thought that are hundreds of years out of date, and thus fundamentally flawed. The whole thing is very active — it moves rapidly, is full of jokes, and is just eleven minutes long. But at the same time, there’s a lot to dig into here. If you enjoy this, you’ll also like Robinson’s talk highlighted last week, How Schools Fail Creative Kids, or the hour-long source lecture that this animation was based on (see below).

Topics: how our public education system is inherently a revolutionary idea, but from several centuries back; the Enlightenment view of intelligence; what a load of crap this “particular view of the mind” is; a map of ADHD prescriptions; the hierarchy of educational disciplines; schools as factories.

For: everyone who has ever been to school.

Further Reading

Sir Ken wrote a book on this topic: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. I haven’t read it, but the Amazon reviews are pretty glowing. He also wrote The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. See below for another lecture by Sir Ken, which was the source material for this RSA Animate video.

Transcript

This video is edited down from a much longer talk (see below). A full transcript of the longer talk is quite interesting, though may be confusing if you’re trying to map it to this particular video. A good transcript of the RSA Animate video is also available, though it’s not integrated directly into the YouTube video above.

Bonus Points

The original lecture (about an hour long) by Sir Ken is embedded below. The audio starts out a little quiet, but is cleaned up starting a few minutes in. Enjoy!

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Earlier this month, I explained how Magic Eye pictures work. A lot of people commented about how they can never see the hidden image. So what gives? Is there something wrong with these people’s eyes? Are they cursed? Are there really no hidden pictures? Is this all a hoax?

Most Magic Eye problems have to do with the way the eyes work with each other and the brain. (more…)

Time for some fairly deep physics — strap yourselves in! For many decades, notions of a “theory of everything” have floated around scientific circles: can the universe be explained by a “unified theory,” in other words a theory that unifies the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics? Each of these theories works well in their realms (the very big and the very small), but trying to tie them together doesn’t work easily. String theory is one of several possible ways to do this — but there are others, and they all lack much in the way of testable proof. Some scientists continue to think that a unified theory is impossible.

On March 7, 2011, a six-member panel of scientists joined Neil deGrasse Tyson to discuss that elusive “theory of everything.” For about an hour and a half, this distinguished group tears it up:

Dr. Katherine Freese, professor of physics at the University of Michigan

Dr. Jim Gates, professor of physics at the University of Maryland-College Park

Dr. Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College

Dr. Marcello Gleiser, professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College

Dr. Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University

Dr. Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Topics: a report from Brian Greene on string theory (ten years after the first such panel), a discussion of the core problem(s) at hand, chirality, data is always just a year away, balloons, Flatland, gravitons, Adinkra symbols, and many other topics. To paraphrase what reader James said earlier this week in suggesting this discussion, the most bizarre and engaging part of this talk is when Dr. Gates raises the possibility that we all may indeed live in some form of The Matrix and are ourselves basically just mathematical/computer code. Want to know what’s up with that? Watch.

For: science/physics nerds. The talk is aimed at the layman, though it may seem fairly technical to non-nerds.

Representative Quote: “Science is not about what’s true or what might be true, science is about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by the weight of public evidence.” -Lee Smolin

Viewing tip: the introductions are nice, and they explain each panelist’s background (two are high school dropouts!), but they are eminently skippable. If you want to get right into the discussion, skip ahead to about 17:00.

Further Reading

Several of these panelists, and NDT himself, have written great books. I’d recommend Brian Greene’s books The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality.

Transcript

I haven’t found a transcript of this discussion, and the auto-captions are awful. If you locate a good transcript, please point it out in the comments.

Suggest a Lecture

Got a favorite lecture? Is it online in some video format? Leave a comment and we’ll check it out! Many thanks to reader James for suggesting this one.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist (or “brain scientist”) from Indiana. In 1996 she experienced a major stroke, out of the blue, at age 37. As a scientist deeply involved with brain function, she was ideally situated to understand the stroke as it happened (as much as anyone can during a frickin’ stroke), and later to draw meaningful lessons from what happened. That stroke is the topic of this twenty-minute lecture.

Bolte Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight” is the second most-watched TED Talk of all time, with many millions of views across various channels. It’s a curious lecture, as my first reaction to it was, frankly, “Boy, this lady seems to be using some hippie-dippy language in describing the people in the room.” (Lots of “energy” and “connection” and such.) It was only after I’d listened to the entire talk that I understood her point: the brain’s hemispheres have different ways of viewing the world; she chooses to inhabit the hemisphere that uses language that I perceived as hippie-dippy. This is actually really profound and emotional — watch the talk to witness this arc for yourself.

Topics: the brain’s hemispheres as parallel and serial processors, the separate experiences of those two brains, what happens when one begins to malfunction, and what this means about our individual experience of the world.

For: anyone interested in the brain, cognition, and how we think about our world. Warning: a real human brain is shown and handled onstage, as an explanatory prop. This may be gross to some lots of people. It’s fairly brief.

Further Reading

Although I haven’t read it, Bolte Taylor wrote a book about her experience, entitled My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. She also has an extensive website which reveals that, among other things, she endorses Taylor acoustic guitars. Nice!

Transcript

TED Talks have great transcripts; on the TED site there’s an interactive transcript (upper right part of the page) and there are subtitles available in 42 languages on the TED site. You can even download high-quality versions of the video with or without subtitles.

Suggest a Lecture

Got a favorite lecture? Is it online in some video format? Leave a comment and we’ll check it out! Many thanks to reader Karen for suggesting this one.